Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  He frowned. “You’re sure that she’s a succubus?”

  “Well, at least partly. She felt like a few different things. I’m guessing she’s some kind of mixed-breed thing, like a demon mutt.”

  Demon mutt. He couldn’t have been more offended if Brianna had deliberately insulted Elise. “You’ll never say those words again,” James said.

  The witch stalked around the base of the rocks, grabbing a fistful of plain white candles from James’s supply bag. “Whatever. You told me that we were going to be partners. Right? If this has to do with demons, I should know. I should be able to prepare myself.”

  “Trust me, Brianna,” James said. “It doesn’t matter how much warning I give you. You will never be prepared for this.”

  He pressed a hand to the altar. Another spell shook the earth, sending rocks crashing down the face of the cliff.

  A sculpted face appeared above the outstretched hand. He had refined, ancient features, blank eyes, and a faint smile.

  It was a sculpture of Metaraon, of the highest choir of angels, and the Voice of God.

  Twelve

  Elise didn’t return to Original Sin after her conversation with James. Instead, she met Rylie at McIntyre’s office, where the other werewolf had been chained. It only took a glance to recognize that Katja didn’t look possessed—she looked like a werewolf with silver poisoning. All of the usual symptoms were there, as if she had deliberately chosen them out of Lucian Wilder’s guide to killing werewolves: the shivers, the pallor, the way she snapped at Elise’s ankles with human teeth whenever she approached.

  “It’s definitely possession,” Rylie insisted. She was drumming her fingers on her arm and bouncing between her feet. She looked as uneasy to be in the darkened shack with the chained werewolf as Elise was to be in full moonlight.

  Elise responded with a noncommittal noise.

  McIntyre’s office wasn’t holding up well to Katja’s occupation. He had been forced to remove his laptop, the server rack beside his desk, and all of the weapons he used to have hanging on his walls; all that remained was a destroyed desk and cotton puffballs from a decimated mattress. The windows had already been boarded up so that Elise could crash on his floor during the day, but some of the boards had been recently replaced from the outside. Katja was demolishing the room.

  The werewolf wasn’t in a destructive mood now. She was barely moving, curled up in the dark rear half of the room. Elise could taste the flutter of her heartbeat. She was close to delicious death, growing weaker by the hour.

  But that was all that Elise could sense from her. Katja’s mind buzzed with white noise, much like a kopis did once bound to an aspis. The infected hybrid had sounded like that, too. Maybe she wasn’t possessed, but there was definitely something wrong with Katja.

  There was only one way to find out if she was possessed or not.

  “I’ll need a circle of power,” Elise said decisively. “Just to make sure I can contain the magic.”

  “Wait, you’re going to cast a spell?” Seth asked. “You can do that?”

  “Get Leticia,” Elise said.

  He frowned like he wanted to argue, but Rylie immediately moved for the door. “I’ll get her.”

  Alone in the shack with Elise—aside from Katja, who was too delirious to be of any use—Seth could feel the weight of Elise’s expectant eyes all too acutely. He wondered what she thought every time she looked at him. Did she see a kopis that ran with wolves, or did she just see a bucket of God’s blood waiting to be spilled in the right place?

  It was impossible to tell. Maybe she wasn’t seeing him at all. Her face was tense, her eyes unfocused, though she was turned in Katja’s direction. She kind of looked like she was…melting. Fading. Turning transparent. She hadn’t moved since Rylie stepped out the door.

  “Elise?” Seth asked.

  Her gaze snapped into focus. “Got a lighter?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Get the lotus incense burning.” She grabbed the salt out of McIntyre’s cabinet and started sprinkling it over the windowsills. She didn’t watch to make sure Seth obeyed, but he did. The smoky scent wafted around him.

  Was Elise going to bring up the blood thing? Was she going to threaten him, demand his compliance? She didn’t even look at him as she laid a crescent of salt behind Katja.

  Seth couldn’t resist anymore. He asked, “Have you seen James lately?”

  “Yes,” Elise said. She nudged Katja’s shivering, prone body toward the center of the floor with her foot, then sprinkled salt where she had been positioned moments before.

  “Did he…say anything?” Seth asked. “About the Eden thing?”

  Elise’s lips curled into a frown. “Carry the incense past all of the windows. Follow my footsteps.”

  “James left me a diary that said I’m from Adam’s human bloodline,” Seth said, waving the incense around the window beside him. “It doesn’t make sense. What other bloodline could there be?”

  “Ask James.”

  “I’m not talking to James. I don’t want to give him what he wants.”

  Elise finally looked at him. She stopped walking, weighing the jar of salt in her hand, brow furrowed. Her skin didn’t seem to crease the way that humans’ did. Even with her mouth twisted, her face was perfectly, eerily smooth. Like a mannequin that had been shaped to make exactly that expression.

  “Adam made humans with Lilith,” she said. “She was a sculptor. She formed them from clay at his command.” Elise rested a hand over her heart. “She made this body. I used to be like you—a kopis, a human.”

  “How?”

  “It’s complicated. Doesn’t matter, though. It’s not catching.”

  He laughed shakily. “Good.”

  “By the time Adam mandated the creation of most humans, he had already entered something called the Origin and become God. But he also made a few humans the natural way, before he changed. That’s the bloodline that led to you and Abel.”

  Elise set the jar of salt on McIntyre’s desk and stepped over Katja again. She was as tall as Seth in her boots, and she didn’t need to look up to meet his gaze. It was disconcerting to realize that her black irises had bled to consume the entire eye. He fought not to take another step back.

  Her frown deepened as she examined him. “You don’t look anything like him,” Elise said. “He was taller.”

  Seth couldn’t seem to remember how to breathe. “You’ve seen Adam?”

  A torrent of emotion cascaded over her face, flickering quickly from sadness, to fear, to anger, and the deepest regret. It took visible effort to smooth her features again. Elise picked up the jar of salt and turned away. “I could protect you,” she said. “You and your entire family. If James knows what you are, then others will follow. I’m the only one that won’t want you to bleed.”

  It was an unexpectedly generous offer, considering that Seth had been waiting for her to announce that she was about to simplify her life by killing him and everyone else with his blood.

  “My family can protect themselves.” Seth hesitated, watching the incense’s smoke twist over its smoldering tip. “Are you hiring?” Elise arched an eyebrow at him. “The Hunting Club. You and McIntyre and that other guy. Do you need another kopis? I’ve been planning to leave the sanctuary for a while, but I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  She brought the line of salt within inches of the place she had begun, encircling almost the entire room. But she didn’t close it. “I could use more hands,” Elise said.

  It was strange how much that one statement relaxed him. He could be useful with the other kopides. He could save people. And the idea that there was somewhere he could belong—somewhere that he didn’t have to see Rylie and Abel, day in and day out—took a huge weight from Seth’s shoulders.

  Until he turned and saw that Rylie had opened the door to the shack.

  Judging by the look of betrayal on her face, she had heard it all.

  “Rylie,” Seth said, dropping t
he incense on one of the shelves. She had already turned and disappeared into the desert night, leaving Leticia holding the door open.

  Seth caught up with Rylie about a quarter mile away from McIntyre’s trailer. She was walking fast—human fast, but fast enough that he needed to jog in order to reach her before she vanished into the night.

  He snagged her arm to stop her.

  “Come on, Rylie,” he said when she tried to pull free, hanging her head so that she wouldn’t have to look at him. “Let me explain.”

  “I’ve been careful,” Rylie said. Her voice sounded strange—not growling strange, but like she was choking on the words. “Abel and I haven’t been sharing a cottage. I don’t kiss him where I know you’ll see. I’m doing everything I can to make you feel like…like you still belong.”

  “Like you’re not mated to my brother?” Seth asked.

  “I just didn’t want you to feel like you couldn’t be with the pack.”

  “Abel thinks you’ve been pulling away from him because of me,” he said. “And you have, even if not for the reasons he thinks.”

  “He knows I made my choice,” Rylie said.

  “You did. And now I’m making mine. The sanctuary’s not where I belong. Once I’m gone, everything’ll be easier—for you, for Abel, for everyone.”

  “But the pack needs you.”

  “The pack needs a pair of happily mated Alphas. That’s what they need. And it’s not happening while the ghost of our relationship is haunting the place.” Seth raked a hand through his hair. “Maybe you don’t care if you have to live with that kind of stress, but I care. I’m done.”

  He finally released her arm. Rylie drew in on herself, hugging her ribs as if afraid that she might fall apart if she didn’t squeeze every muscle tight. When she finally lifted her head, her golden eyes were shimmering with unshed tears.

  “I’ve been afraid that this was going to happen for months,” Rylie said. “I keep having nightmares about you leaving me.” Her hands flew to her mouth, fluttering over her lips, like she thought that she could pull the words out of the air after they had been spoken. “I mean, the pack. I don’t want you to leave the pack. They need you.” Special emphasis on “they.”

  “No,” Seth said, “they don’t.”

  And they hadn’t for a long time.

  Rylie and Seth hadn’t talked about their breakup since it happened. They hadn’t even had a real talk about the breakup then, either—it wasn’t like Rylie had sat him down to say, “Look, I really need Abel, so we should consider our engagement over.” Instead, the relationship had festered for months.

  He didn’t blame her for that any more than he blamed Rylie for the people she had murdered as a wolf. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Especially when they learned she was pregnant, and nobody had known if conception had occurred with Seth when she was human or on the moons with Abel.

  Seth had learned that they weren’t together anymore at the same time that he had learned that Summer and Abram weren’t his children. He had seen Rylie and Abel holding hands. That one little gesture had spoken volumes.

  There had been no fighting, no screaming, no tears. The only girl that Seth had ever loved had faded away from him.

  A clean break would have been easier.

  Seth pulled the chain out of his shirt. The werewolf fang that dangled beside Nash’s summoning stone hadn’t belonged to any werewolf in the pack, but it did belong to a past that he had decided to leave behind. Its weight was a cutting reminder of everything that had happened to him. He didn’t want to look back anymore. Only forward.

  He pulled it off the chain and dropped it in Rylie’s hand. She curled her fingers around it, rubbing the pad of her thumb over the tip.

  “When you go back to the sanctuary, I’m going to stay with Elise and McIntyre,” Seth said with a note of finality.

  And at last, he would be free.

  While Leticia made the finishing touches on the circle of power, Elise sat in the darkness of McIntyre’s trailer and tried not to fall apart.

  The girls were asleep. She could hear them breathing deeply in their shared bedroom, inhaling through stuffy noses and giving little sighs on the exhales. In dreaming, Deb and Dana’s minds were colorfully complicated, buzzing with the white noise of nonsense imaginings.

  Theirs were the only heartbeats in the trailer aside from Ace, who was curled up on top of Elise’s feet underneath the kitchen table. He usually sat there when she was at the trailer because he liked for her to rub his stomach with her toes. Ace still jerked and tensed if Elise tried to touch him with her hands—he feared hands, and especially fists—but her feet were okay. Not everyone’s feet, but hers in particular.

  Elise didn’t feel up to petting Ace. She didn’t even feel up to drinking the six-pack of beer she had pulled out of McIntyre’s refrigerator.

  She felt like she was fraying.

  Eyes shut. Deep breaths. Focus on being corporeal.

  Elise didn’t feel hungry the way that she used to get hungry when she was still human, but there was a growing, gnawing void inside of her demanding to be filled. James’s runes under her glove were a constant itch.

  All she had to do was get through this ritual. That was it. Then she could worry about Neuma’s warnings, the feeding thing, and everything that came with it.

  But if she didn’t manage to do that by sunrise, she was going to break.

  Elise pulled the glove off her hand again. The muscle spasms were so much worse when the runes were exposed. And the color of them had changed again, deepening from amber to a deep crimson hue, which bared the skeleton underneath the skin all the way to her wrist.

  With her opposite hand, she sketched the sliding runes onto the back of a pizza delivery flier she had stolen off of McIntyre’s fridge. They were complicated marks, and they moved a lot, so it was hard to pin them down long enough to get all the details. She had only drawn two so far. There were more rippling over her knuckles, and she intended to draw them all before using them.

  The skin on her entire forearm began to fade. Elise gritted her teeth and pulled the glove back on.

  McIntyre stepped through the front door, careful not to let the screen door squeal as it shut behind him. He sprawled in the chair on the opposite side of the dining room table.

  His feet must have gotten too close to Ace. Elise heard the dog growl under the table.

  “What you drawing?” he asked, snagging a beer.

  “Magic,” Elise said.

  He knew that it was strange for her to be drawing spells, but he only grunted in acknowledgment. That blissful simplicity was one of the best things about McIntyre. “Tish says she’ll be done in about fifteen minutes. Where’d the kids go?”

  She didn’t think he meant his daughters.

  “Seth and Rylie went for a walk,” Elise said. She set down the pen, fixing McIntyre with a hard gaze. Or at least she attempted to. Her was too blurry to pull it off. “You should have told me that Seth and Rylie were here.”

  McIntyre shrugged. “Thought you might kill Seth the instant you saw him.” He had been debriefed on what they learned after the fight in Northgate; he knew as well as anyone what Seth and Abel could do.

  “I’m not homicidal.”

  He gave another shrug, more half-hearted than before. “I don’t think you’d kill him if you don’t have to. Didn’t want you to be in a place to make that choice. Just trying to help.”

  “He asked for a job with us.”

  “What did you say?” McIntyre asked, rubbing his thumb down the perspiration on the side of the bottle.

  “I agreed,” Elise said.

  He grunted again. Blissful simplicity. “Guess you’re not likely to kill him, then.”

  “Guess not.” She glanced at the clock. Four hours to sunrise. Four hours to perform an exorcism before the world became bright and she had to vanish for twelve hours.

  Elise pulled off her glove, preparing to draw a few more symbols.

/>   “News said that there’s been a volcanic eruption in Tacoma,” McIntyre said, taking a long swig of his beer.

  “There are volcanoes in Tacoma?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  That was the same story that the news had tried to pull when Reno was under demonic assault. The Union had fed news agencies information about volcanic activity, weird electrical storms, whatever it took to conceal the truth. But everyone knew the truth now.

  If they were using that lie again, then whatever was happening was worse than the information that the Office of Preternatural Affairs had been spreading.

  “Hybrids?” Elise guessed.

  “Beats me. I called one of my kopis friends to check it out—Reathel, the big guy with the beard. You remember him. He’s stationed in the undercity below Seattle. He’ll tell us if it’s apocalyptic enough to need us.”

  She set her pen down on the paper. One more symbol drawn. Both of her hands were shaking too wildly to etch a clear line. “I can’t deal with apocalyptic right now, McIntyre,” Elise said. “We’ve got enough shit of our own.”

  “What if this is our shit? What if it has to do with the Hell portals?”

  She shut her eyes, unwilling to contemplate that likelihood.

  Hadn’t James said that there had been more murders north of the Bloomfield incident all the way to Washington? Had Tacoma been the site of one of those murders?

  The murders were opening doors to Hell and weakening the walls protecting Earth from infernal onslaught. But Seth had shut the door in Los Angeles. That should have been enough to keep the walls from breaking down any further for now.

  Unless something had happened. Something that Elise had completely missed.

  Seth ripped the front door open with none of the care that McIntyre had used. The hinges groaned, and metal rattled against the side of the trailer.

  He was breathing hard. He had been running.

  “You guys need to see this,” Seth said.